Tag: china

Today I want to talk about a few words that are curiously similar between English and Chinese, and one word that is just curious.

In English, we tend to call people who are active late into the night, night owls. In parts of China, (small) owls are called 夜猫子 yèmaōzi, literally “night catty”. (I don’t know which parts of China would that be, but I guess it’s northern China.) More often, it’s figuratively used to refer to people who stay up late – the same as English night owls. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary also offers another word for late sleepers: 夜游神, literally “nigh-roaming god”, refers people who wander at night.

Also in English, you might know people who program as “code monkeys”, invoking the image of a million monkeys banging on the keyboard. (Wiktionary editor Equinox notes this word is “slang, sometimes derogatory”. Of course, it can also be used self-deprecatingly.) Chinese has the perfect translation for this phrase: 程序猿 chéngxùyúan, pronounced exactly the same as 程序员 chéngxùyúan “programmer”. However, instead of using the character 员, that marks a person’s occupation or membership, as in 驾驶员 driver, 服务员 server or 演员 actor, instead the character for apes, 猿, is used, making it “programmape”. (Well, humans are apes…)

Sometimes typos also make new words: one jocular name for engineers is 攻城狮 gōngchéngshī “fortress-attacking lion” or “siege lion”, again having the exact pronunciation as 工程师 gōngchéngshī “engineer”. The story is like this: Tencent is the company that developed the hugely popular IM program QQ (800 million users) and WeChat (300 million users – about the total population of United States) among other services. One of its microblog accounts posted that one of its security guards managed to go through rounds of interviews, and became an engineer at its research institute. A rare event in itself, and a notable accomplishment indeed. But instead of 工程师, the post coined the word 攻城狮, or siege lion. And the rest is Internet history.

In the United States and Canada, statuary holidays like this tend to be on Mondays and Fridays, which creates a “long weekend”. The National Day in China, however, is a little different. The whole country do no work for a whole week! Many take vacations, so people call this the “golden week”. As a result, the tourist spots become crammed with people, all the expressways get congested from one end to another, and plane tickets sell out (I don’t know how are the trains doing). Hardly a way to take a relaxing vacation.

But the National Day is only a 3-day statuary holiday, so how is it possible that everybody takes a week-long vacation? The keyword here is “transferred holidays”: weekends that are swapped with days in the “golden week”. The State Council publishes a notice every year (like this one for 2014), deciding which rest days are swapped with which working days. Then add another weekend that would fall inside the golden week, and tada! You get a 7-day holiday.

The drawback is of course, you still need to work these two days transferred out. Before 2014, that means working 7 days in a row. For 2014, the days are shifted from a week before and a week after, so only two weeks of working 6 days in a row.

The same holiday transfer is also applied to the Spring Festival, which is like Christmas in that it’s a traditional time for family gatherings; applied to a country that has as many people as China, this results in even bigger traffic every year. Before 2007 this is also applied to the International Labor Day on May the 1st; after 2007, Labor Day is no longer a 7-day holiday. Instead, three traditional Chinese holidays are now designated as new statuary holidays (Qingming, Dragon Boat, and Mid-Autumn festivals). For 2014, all three fall between Friday and Monday, making these also “long weekends”.

In the three holidays, the Dragon Boat festival and the Mid-Autumn festival are based on the traditional Chinese calendar, in which every month is 30 days; so the dates on the Gregorian calendar fluctuates each year. (Instead of leap days, the traditional calendar has leap months.) But the Qingming festival is always April 4th or April 5th; this is because it’s observed 15 days after the Spring Equinox, and the Gregorian calendar is designed to track the seasons, and the Spring Equinox in particular very accurately.

因为Second Life 上有人做了条まもるくん的裤子，却把原角色标成了Waffle Ryebread, 我发现自己正在Google上查找这两个角色的相关图片。Waffle 是 CyberConnect2 制作的 RPG Tail Concerto 的主角，而まもるくん则是 CC2 为福冈县制作的自我保护·防灾减灾吉祥物。很奇妙的是两者是共享世界设定的。所以会搞混吧。……不过这完全不重要。
Because someone on Second Life made a pair of pants of Mamoru-kun, but marked them as belonging to Waffle Ryebread, I found myself searching for pictures relating to these characters. Waffle is the protagonist of Tail Concerto, an RPG made by CyberConnect2, and Mamoru-kun is a mascot for self protection and disaster protection and prevention made by CC2 for the Fukuoka prefecture. Interestingly, they share the same canon. So it’s easy to mess up. …but that’s not important at all.

前几天，“谷歌中国”被中央电视台“新闻联播”以及“焦点访谈”等数个节目“曝光”存在传播淫秽色情内容的现象。这不是普通的新闻节目——说它是全中国被看最多的节目也不为过。所以当 Google 这一以“不要做恶”为座右铭的跨国公司被中视和政府点名以“邪恶地毒害祖国的青少年” (设计台词) 批评，着实让卡库尔很惊讶。
A few days earlier, Guge Zhongguo was “exposed” by several programs of China Central Television, like Xinwen Lianbo and Focus. These are not your average news programs — it’s not an understatement that they are the most watched programs in all of China. So when Google, a international company with a motto of “don’t be evil” was criticized by CCTV and the government as “evilly poisoning the juveniles and youths of the motherland” by name, I was very surprised.

当然，并不是所有人对邪恶的定义都是一样的。例如，自由软件基金会的创始人理查德·斯托曼就认为因为对淫秽内容的网络审查是“纯粹，无杂质的邪恶，没有什么比它更淫秽了”。我不想对此发表意见；除了说互联网上内容众多，无论什么样的过滤，不可能完美地只过滤想过滤的内容，总是会有假阳性和假阴性的。例子：卡库尔在 SafeSearch 强制开启 (是不是点名的结果呢?) 情况下搜索关于まもるくん的图片，竟然找到了很黄很暴力的上车图。
Of course, not everyone has the same definition for evil. For example, the founder of Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, considers censorship of obscene materials to be “pure, unadulterated evil, and there is nothing more obscene.” I do not want to express any opinion on this; except that there are so many contents on the Internet, no matter what kind of censorship, it’s impossible to perfectly filter only (un)desireable contents, there will always be false positives and false negatives. Example: I was trying to search pictures on Mamoru-kun with SafeSearch forced on (was it because of the criticism by name?) and found well… underage porn.

啊……不用试着去搜索了。可能就在你阅读本文的那一刻，那张图片已经被神隐了。再说，你能够通过百万守君的大布镇吗？
Ahh… there’s no use trying to search for that. Maybe as you read this, the picture has been spirited away. Besides, can you make across the giant maze of a million Mamoru-kun?

まもるくん (守君) 似乎是还算普通的名字。特别是在防护吉祥物之中 (这些吉祥物中包括，有没有搞错，一只橘子)……但是也有人名为まもるくん的。还有监测有没有东西掉在地上的机器人。还有防止香蕉腐烂的容器。还有一只猫。
Mamoru-kun (guardian) seems to be a rather generic name. Especially in disaster prevention mascots (including, I’m not making this up, an orange)… but there are also people named Mamoru-kun. And robots that monitor whether there are anything falling on the ground. And a container to prevent bananas from rotting. And a cat.

在英文 WikiFur 的 Tail Concerto 页面上也有人提到了 まもるくん，不过写得让人以为他是某个游戏的角色。如果是就好了。如果 Tail Concerto 能出续集的话，卡库尔会很向往吧。不过教育类游戏高达八成都很无聊，还没有单纯的说教来的要有趣。讲故事的话，也许会更能接受吧。不知道福冈县和CC2有没有制作过まもるくん的动画？
Mamoru-kun is also mentioned on the Tail Concerto article on the English WikiFur, but it sounds as if he is a character from some game. If only that’s true. If Tail Concerto gets a sequel, I would be excited. But edutainment games are often boring, even more than simple lectures. A story would be more receivable. I wonder if Fukuoka Prefecture and CC2 made any animations of Mamoru-kun?